The Inheritors. Джозеф Конрад
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do you come from?” I asked. “You must belong to one of the new nations. You are a foreigner, I’ll swear, because you have such a fine contempt for us. You irritate me so that you might almost be a Prussian. But it is obvious that you are of a new nation that is beginning to find itself.”
“Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is what you mean,” she said.
“The phrase is comprehensive,” I said. I was determined not to give myself away. “Where in the world do you come from?” I repeated. The question, I was quite conscious, would have sufficed, but in the hope, I suppose, of establishing my intellectual superiority, I continued:
“You know, fair play’s a jewel. Now I’m quite willing to give you information as to myself. I have already told you the essentials—you ought to tell me something. It would only be fair play.”
“Why should there be any fair play?” she asked.
“What have you to say against that?” I said. “Do you not number it among your national characteristics?”
“You really wish to know where I come from?”
I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.
“Listen,” she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of wind through a breathless day. “What—what!” I cried.
“I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension.”
I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.
“I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me,” I said, “I have not been very well. I missed what you said.” I was certainly out of breath.
“I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension,” she repeated with admirable gravity.
“Oh, come,” I expostulated, “this is playing it rather low down. You walk a convalescent out of breath and then propound riddles to him.”
I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my inclination to expand. Instead, I looked at her. I was beginning to understand. It was obvious enough that she was a foreigner in a strange land, in a land that brought out her national characteristics. She must be of some race, perhaps Semitic, perhaps Sclav—of some incomprehensible race. I had never seen a Circassian, and there used to be a tradition that Circassian women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so on. What was repelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national point of view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse. What one does not understand one shies at—finds sinister, in fact. And she struck me as sinister.
“You won’t tell me who you are?” I said.
“I have done so,” she answered.
“If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical monstrosity, you are mistaken. You are, really.”
She turned round and pointed at the city.
“Look!” she said.
We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that the wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow, filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red roofs there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was a vision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, and I knew that the glory of it must have moved her.
She was smiling. “Look!” she repeated. I looked.
There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the last word. She said something—uttered some sound.
What had happened? I don’t know. It all looked contemptible. One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster—vaster than cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinity of space.
It was merely momentary. The tower filled its place again and I looked at her.
“What the devil,” I said, hysterically—“what the devil do you play these tricks upon me for?”
“You see,” she answered, “the rudiments of the sense are there.”
“You must excuse me if I fail to understand,” I said, grasping after fragments of dropped dignity. “I am subject to fits of giddiness.” I felt a need for covering a species of nakedness. “Pardon my swearing,” I added; a proof of recovered equanimity.
We resumed the road in silence. I was physically and mentally shaken; and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause. After some time I said:
“You insist then in preserving your—your incognito.”
“Oh, I make no mystery of myself,” she answered.
“You have told me that you come from the Fourth Dimension,” I remarked, ironically.
“I come from the Fourth Dimension,” she said, patiently. She had the air of one in a position of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready to brave it. She had the listlessness of an enlightened person who has to explain, over and over again, to stupid children some rudimentary point of the multiplication table.
She seemed to divine my thoughts, to be aware of their very wording. She even said “yes” at the opening of her next speech.
“Yes,” she said. “It is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of any age to a person of the age that has gone before.” She paused, seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me. “As if I were explaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the cockney school of poetry.”
“I understand,” I said, “that you wish me to consider myself as relatively a Choctaw. But what I do not understand is; what bearing that has upon—upon the Fourth Dimension, I think you said?”
“I will explain,” she replied.
“But you must explain as if you were explaining to a Choctaw,” I said, pleasantly, “you must be concise and convincing.”
She answered: “I will.”
She made a long speech of it; I condense. I can’t remember her exact words—there were so many; but she spoke like a book. There was something exquisitely piquant in her choice of words, in her expressionless voice. I seemed to be listening to a phonograph reciting a technical work. There was a touch of the incongruous, of the mad, that appealed to me—the commonplace rolling-down landscape, the straight, white, undulating road that, from the tops of rises, one saw running for miles and miles, straight, straight, and so white. Filtering down through the great blue of the sky came the thrilling of innumerable skylarks. And I was listening to a parody of a scientific work recited by a phonograph.
I heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension—heard that it was an inhabited plane—invisible to our eyes, but omnipresent; heard that I had seen it when Bell Harry had reeled before my eyes. I heard the Dimensionists described: a race clear-sighted, eminently practical, incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable and immortal. She did not say that they were immortal, however. “You would—you will—hate us,” she concluded. And I seemed only then to come to myself. The power of her imagination was so great that I fancied myself face to face with the truth. I supposed she had been amusing herself; that she should have tried to frighten me was inadmissible. I don’t pretend that I was completely at my ease, but I said, amiably: “You certainly have succeeded in making these beings hateful.”
“I have made nothing,” she said with a faint smile, and went on amusing herself. She would explain origins, now.
“Your”—she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the